Tuesday, June 30, 2015

Mary Ann Glendon - Religious Freedom in Danger

Mary Ann Glendon's lament is a mystery to me. I see nothing in my liberal family that remotely resembles what she is talking about. I see her world view as upside down. In my mind social conservatives eschew social responsibility. Individual fulfillment is distorted by the profit motive which they celebrate.

Sexual morality is important - freedom to marry - or not, respect for women, acceptance of homosexuals, and planned parenthood are liberal values that seem to me to deserve to be championed.

As to the scourge of irresponsible fathers - that seems to me to be a consequence of the forces that drive down wages - among whom Glendon's Republican allies are prime movers. - gwc

Learned Hand Professor of Law at Harvard University, Former Ambassador of the United States to the Holy SeeMember, United States Commission on International Religious Freedom

"At the heart of this turn to expressive individualism, of course, was a revolution in sexual mores, where the pursuit of individual self-fulfillment at all costs caused more and more people to fall away from churches that uphold rigorous standards of sexual morality. Like other revolutions, the sexual revolution had its
costs and casualties, some of which took time to come into view. With hindsight, though, it was the beginning of what George Weigel has aptly called a “long march through the institutions of American life, and through the public moral culture those institutions once embodied as well as sustained.” Those embattled institutions include three great mainstays of human well-being: the rule of law, the Church, and the marriage-based family."

And so it came to pass that the very period when some of us saw the civil rights movement as expanding the inclusiveness of what Rev. King called the Beloved Community, was actually a time when individual self-expression was about to become an overriding value. Five decades later, we can see the effects of this transformation in practically every aspect of life, including the appearance of a new public morality that turns the Judeo-Christian moral inheritance upside down, and that brooks no dissent from its rigid new dogmas.

We can also see that the zeal for maximizing individual self-fulfillment took its heaviest toll on the most defenseless. When one considers the epidemic of fatherlessness and the havoc wrought by abortion, it is hard to pretend that you can have freedom without responsibility, rights without duties, and sex without
consequences.